Food and health

phorus, lime, magnesia, potash, in forms that the body can use. The fruit acids, especially in a meat diet, do away with the need of medicine. Fruit is so valuable in the diet that APPLE EDIBLE PORTIOI Water:84.6 Carbohydrates: 14.2 Fuel VALUE: rER POUND ^United States Department of Agriculture. Ofl5ce of Experiment Stations, A. C. True, Director. Chart prepared by C. F. Langworthy, Expert in charge of Nutrition Investigations. you should make fruit every day one of your home mottoes. Why does fruit sometimes disagree with us ? If we eat too much unripe fruit or if the fruit is not fresh, it may not agree with us. Cooked fruit can be taken by some people who cannot eat it raw, because the cooking softens the fruit and kills bacteria that might cause some trouble. Cooked fruit is better for little children than raw fruit. Fruit juice again. Clear fruit juice squeezed from the pulp — orange juice, for instance — is given to very young children, who ought not to eat the pulp, and to invalids sometimes. How shall we prepare fresh fruit for the table ? Large fruit should be washed, pared, or peeled with clean hands. Slice it, sprinkle with sugar just before eating, and serve it as cool as you can make it. You have used bananas, oranges, and peaches in this way. Try mellow apples and pears, and serve with milk or cream and sugar. Berries should be picked over and washed, and served in the same way as sliced fruit. How shall we cook fruit ? We have said very little as yet about the effect of cooking. on our foods. Compare a baked apple with a raw apple, and describe the changes. With your eye you see a change in color. You can easily cut the baked apple with a spoon ; but you need a knife for the raw apple. The cooking, then, has softened the skin and the fiber of the apple. Taste the apple. Even if it has been cooked without sugar, you will find that it has a new flavor. The cooking of fruit on the fire goes on with the work of the sun in ripening fruit on the tree. The difference between cooked and raw ripe fruit is somewhat like the difference between ripe and green fruit. Can you see how ? Heat does work miracles. Have you ever heard the true "fairy" story, that all our heat comes from the sun ? So, when we "bake" fruit, we are really putting it where it becomes a little riper with the heat of the sun, are we not ? One other thing that the heat accomplishes, we have learned in the lesson on canning. Now you can tell quite a story in your notebook about heat and an apple, illustrated with the picture of a fine, smooth fruit. Stewing and baking fruit. You have seen apple sauce and baked apples at home, and perhaps have prepared both yourself. Miss James asked her cooking class to describe nice ways of cooking apples and other fruit used at home, and to see what they could find in cook books. These are some of the suggestions. Mollie Stark's grandmother told her about cooking fruit slowly for a long time in an old-fashioned brick oven (see Frontispiece), making a clear, dark red apple sauce. "The longer and the slower, the better," she said ; and Mollie's grandmother was quite right. You have not a brick oven, but you can slice apples into an earthen pot, add a very little water and sugar, cover and cook when the fire is low. You will find the apple sauce delicious. One of the girls described tart (slightly sour) apples